He voted against banning partial-birth abortions. He also voted against notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions:
http://www.issues2000.org/social/Barack_Obama_Abortion.htm

He boasted on his campaign web site of being "a leader in the Illinois legislature in the battle to protect a woman's right to choose" abortion.

Speaking at a Planned Parenthood Action Fund event on July 17, 2007, Obama said that the Supreme Court's 5-4 Gonzales v. Carhart decision (upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions) was part of a "concerted effort to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women." [That's quoted from his barackobama.com campaign web site.] If Obama gets a chance to appoint replacements for any of the five Supreme Court Justices who upheld the partial-birth abortion ban, the Gonzales v. Carhart decision will probably be reversed, and partial-birth abortion legalized.

Obama is a co-sponsor of the so-called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would abolish almost all contraints on abortion, and would legalize partial-birth abortion. Obama says that, if elected, one of his first acts as president will be to sign FOCA. (He makes it sound like passage of FOCA by Congress is a done deal; fortunately, that isn't true.)

Incredibly, while Obama was an Illinois Senator, he even repeatedly supported infanticide (killing already-born-alive babies) in some circumstances (when an aborted baby comes out accidentally alive), though he has lately retreated from that position.
 

In defense of this stance, he wrote, "...nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount."

That rationale is hard for me to understand because what he calls "an obscure line" in Romans is actually a sizable chunk of the first chapter of Romans (and it is consistent with several other passages of scripture), and it doesn't conflict with the Sermon on the Mount because there is no mention at all of sodomy or homosexuality in the Sermon on the Mount.
 

You can read about his radical church on their own web site:
http://www.tucc.org/talking_points.htm
http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

Quoting from the church web site, "We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Click here to read about Dr. Wright's talking points for Trinity United Church of Christ its Web site and the Black Value System."

If you click there you will read that, "The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ is based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone's book, Black Power and Black Theology."

To that, someone on FreeRepublic.com wryly responded, "Their Black Value System seems at odds with Galatians 3:26-28: 'You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'"

If you're not bothered by the Trinity UCC web site, then you must be insensitive to racial bigotry. Imagine what Trinity UCC's talking points would sound like if you changed the word "black" to "white." Imagine if a candidate for President belonged to a church with a web site that said, "We are a congregation which is Unashamedly White and Unapologetically Christian... click here to read our pastor's talking points for our church and the White Value System." That sounds like Ku Klux Klansman David Duke!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am a refugee from the United Church of Christ, which is easily the most extreme liberal and pro-abortion Christian denomination in America. (Paraphrasing Reagan, "I didn't leave them, they left me.") But, even within the UCC, Obama's church represents the far Left fringe.
 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/The-Audacity-of-Hope-by-Barack-Obama-10808
(The reviewer went easy on Obama, but noticed some glaring untruths in the book.)
 

Another example is energy. Obama claimed repeatedly during the debates that he would promote the use of "clean coal technology" to help meet our energy needs. But he also supports strict "carbon caps" to cut CO₂ emissions (by 80%!!!), and that is incompatible with the use of fossil fuels like coal. No matter how thoroughly you clean the emissions, the result of burning coal is lots of CO₂ (though whether that's actually a problem is debatable), and proposals to sequester it rather than release it into the atmosphere are of dubious practicality. In other words, either Obama's pledge to encourage use of "clean coal technology" is untrue, or his pledge to support carbon caps is. What's more, Obama knows it: in an unguarded moment during an interview in January, 2008 with the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama said, "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted." (Fortunately for Obama, the Chronicle kept quiet about this bombshell until a blogger discovered it less than 48 hours before the election.)

However, Obama also lies about little things. He often just makes things up while he's talking, to make better applause lines. For instance, here you can see him making up a false story about how he courageously talked tough with the Detroit automakers and "nobody clapped."

Here you can read about how he claimed that the Senate Banking Committee was "my committee," even though, actually, he's not on it, and never has been. When he got called on that lie, his campaign released a statement saying that he had simply misspoken, and meant to say it was "his bill" which the committee had passed. But that was another lie. The truth is that it wasn't his committee, it wasn't his bill, he didn't write it, and he didn't even vote for it.

He even sometimes claims to have been a "law professor" or "constitutional law professor," when actually he was only a lecturer. He has been telling this lie for years. Here are a few examples:

• "As a legislator as well as a law professor, I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts." -Barack H. Obama, in a 2001 WBEZ radio interview
• "Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's [2004] primary campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles." -Lynn Sweet, Washington Bureau Chief, Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 8, 2004
• "I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution." -Barack H. Obama, March 30, 2007

Those might seem like minor lies. But in Luke 16:10 Jesus teaches, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much."

Plainly, Obama cannot be trusted.
 

"What's been largely left out of the media coverage of Obama's book deal is that he received a $1.9 million advance for his three book deal after he won his Illinois US Senate seat, but before he was sworn in, which allowed him to skirt Senate ethics rules."
http://capitalfax.blogspot.com/2006/05/barack-obamas-new-book-out-this-fall.html

Senate ethics rules are supposed to prevent Senators from taking money in sufficient quantity to influence them. $1.9 million is sufficient to influence most folks, certainly including Obama.
 

According to Judicial Watch, "Two months after he joined the Senate, Obama purchased $50,000 worth of stock in speculative companies whose major investors were his biggest campaign contributors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that benefited from legislation Obama pushed just two weeks after the senator purchased $5,000 of the company's shares."

What do you call it when a politician buys $5000 of stock from an obscure company, and two weeks later pushes legislation to help boost that company's stock value? How can anyone deny that Obama is corrupt, or at the very least stupid and ethically tone-deaf?  
 

Dave Burton
http://www.burtonsys.com/email/
 

P.S. - For a vastly more detailed comparison between Obama and McCain, see this "letter to a young mother," by Marty McCaffrey.

P.P.S. - For my annual "Dave's Picks" election recommendations, see
http://www.burtonsys.com/davespicks.html
 
 

[short link to this article]
v.1 01/03/2008
v.9 11/01/2009